Cafe Dementia
by menme
Summary: House has a stalker with some unusual ways of getting attention.


**CAFE DEMENTIA**

_Monday_

It all started with the bedroom light. It was the Year of Good Things; he had the goods, Stacy, hinting she had come to believe in marriage after years of marital agnosticism, perhaps even a deism of children, a satisfying thought because it meant success on the love front, though it gave him palpitations to think of having a family. Cuddy had offered him his own diagnostic department after she had gotten drunk at the last Christmas party (inebriation the only explanation; his diagnoses as nephrologist, though brilliant, could never offset his bad-boy behavior), so that he now had three fellows who admired the palpitations right out of him, gazing up at him every morning, eager babes-in-the-woods, never questioning. He had his health, running every morning, the solid sense of his body as a knife slicing through the startled air, golf on Saturdays. Only the melancholy that shot through him at times ruffled him, disconnected as it was from the success story of his life, never caused by any event he could discern, a chamber bursting open in him at incongruous sounds, a cough from another room or the scrape of shoes on winter ice, as though someone had told him something very sad which he could no longer recall.

"Maybe it didn't start with the bedroom light," he muttered. Outside his office window sun licked away at the ice that had arrived overnight, silent drippings everywhere. The trees looked weighted down. "Have you ever felt like you were being followed, even though you can't see anyone?"

Wilson seated across from him frowned at his backpedaling, and then continued power-shoveling his lunch of chicken cacciatore into his mouth with the speed of someone who knew it could be stolen any moment. "It's called paranoia," he said around the food. "Can we skip circumspect and get to the part where you tell me what this is about?" _What this is about_. A Wilson hand, perfectly manicured, waved in front of his face, their sign that he had become lost in reverie. "House?"

It had been a simple thing. He had gone into the bedroom one evening for a sweater, the little half-cape he had bought with Stacy in Mount Rose always cold, and he had switched off the bedroom light and closed the door behind him before heading down the hall, then remembered a book he wanted. When he opened the bedroom door again, seconds after closing it, the light was back on. He had still been able to feel the light switch beneath his fingers, the palpable sense that he had turned it off. The first, adrenalized thought was that someone was in the room, an intruder, imbalanced, slipping out of the closet to turn the light back on the moment he left, using his bedroom during the times he wasn't there.

"It was mental garbage of course." He glanced at Wilson and tapped his own face to let him know he had sauce on his mouth. The oncologist grabbed a napkin. "I hadn't really turned off the light. The brain misfires. You _intend_ to turn off the light, you visualize it, and your brain stores the intention as a real memory. Bad gateways, mind mistakes." The lecturer in him coming out was a clear sign he felt the need to convince himself. "Deja vu is mental debris, presque vu, all those things. We know where they come from nowadays. The brain stops paying attention for a second."

"Yes," sighed Wilson. "Deja vu isn't what it used to be." With his meal stashed beyond reach, his frown returned. "And this is when you called the police?"

"Right. The serial light switcher is finally brought to justice. No –" he scrutinized the icicles melting from his balcony rail. "Like I said, I recognize mental garbage when I think it. The Keystone Kop incident was a week later."

His house was his sanctuary, his bear cave. Allowing the two blank-faced 911-summoned officers to tramp through it had been about as comfortable as a colonoscopy, his dark corners all on display, and their obvious disbelief made it worse. "Say it again," the older one had requested, once they had checked the doors and windows that looked out on the icy night, the man's steel-gray hair and pinched expression branding their owner as the bitter incompetent who had never made it out of patrol, the one who suspected everyone of jerking his chain. He told them again while the (very) junior partner listened. His girlfriend was away at a two-day law conference. They always kept all the doors closed in winter because of drafts. He had come home from work and found every door to every room open.

"Someone's been through the house," he had repeated.

The officer had assured him there was no sign of B&E. "Nothing missing, according to you, nothing out of place. The front door was still locked when you got here, right?"

"There's this." In the middle of his desk his laptop stood open and flickering a screen-saver. "When I left this morning this was off." The cop's face had attained a new level of blank, world-record blank. He had stopped taking notes. "Do I have to bribe you people with donuts to make you believe me?" They had left soon after.

"I was told to 'Come down and file a report in the morning'," he finished to Wilson now. "Funny how police precincts are always 'down.' Conjures dungeons, doesn't it? Or maybe the municipal trash dump."

"Which you – did or did not do?" Wilson, the oracle of his character in every conceivable situation, seemed surprised at himself that he couldn't guess the House take on the matter. But then the story was convoluted, following a going-nowhere, balloon-farting-through-the-air path, his reasons for recounting it abstruse even to himself.

"It would have been a useless venture into Copland, which I decided to forego." The nights spent since, as he woke to every creak in the house and listened for more, he would forego talking about. "Though Stacy wanted me to. One very nervous woman after she got back and I told her about it. Wanted to change the locks. Especially after I tossed my cookies."

"I…assume this is the twist on the tale."

"Two days later I'm about to delete the cookies on my laptop and it occurs to me to look through them."

"And?" A wide-eyed _And_, attention roped.

"And there were a few sites there I never _ever_ set foot in. Okay, that's arguably the point of the Internet, but you know what I mean."

His listener nodded. "So, someone broke into your house, say just to go through all your rooms and use your laptop for funky stuff, leaving no sign of entry, but forgetting to erase obvious signs like doors left open or the laptop left on." Without ado, Wilson had become quietly serious, leaning forward with fingers steepled, moving at high speed past the possibility that he was being screwed with, because it wouldn't matter either way, taking it at face value and ready to help unravel the problem. It was a trait that never failed to warm his friendship synapses. "I would say offhand - you have a stalker. Someone who wants to send you a signal."

"More than a signal." He hesitated to tell him what else he had noticed on the night of the non-break-in. Wilson's credulity was a known variable that would not extend beyond a certain limit. Through the office glass he watched Foreman and Cameron enter the conference room deep in argument, Chase nonchalant behind them. "That night when I came home from work, before I noticed all the doors were open, I went to the front closet to change my shoes, put on the sneakers I wear around the house." Deep inside their argument his fellows seemed to find a point of consensus, heads bent over a file. He turned back to Wilson. "The sneakers were warm inside, as though someone had just taken them off."

In the silence that seeped off Wilson, mouth narrowed to a little _o_, Foreman stuck his head in the door and said, "Patient." For a moment, before he could attune his mind to the file in Foreman's hand, it seemed an admonition, a call to go slow in the little mystery he faced. _Patience is not one of my virtues_, he almost replied. Instead he said, "God hears your prayer and will answer it in a moment," waggling his fingers at Foreman when the neurologist did not retreat immediately. Alone again with Wilson, he shrugged.

"I didn't tell Stacy the part about the sneakers. Didn't tell the cops. That whoever it is isn't just following me, they're trying to _be_ me."

"What are you going to do?"

The assumption that he would not take it lying down it pleased him. He could not have explained why the matter made him feel invigorated. Life was sweet without the pinpricks of problems, his sweeter than most perhaps, yet it was as though he had been asleep for a long time, having dozed off at some point he could no longer recall, the bouts of melancholy a myoclonic jerk waking his mind to the fact that it needed problems to solve.

"I'm going to stalk the stalker," he declared.

The response was an _hmm_ and a raised eyebrow. "And how do you lurk around after someone lurking around after you? I see an Escher drawing in this somewhere."

"First things first. A spy camera, trained on my desk at home when Stacy and I are both at work." He didn't mention he had already left the camera on for a week, with no results. Maybe he could hire a private detective to stake out his house, follow him to work and see if he noticed someone else following him. "I'll find a way."

Foreman reappeared in the door. He wore his stubborn face.

"Dr. House, they're going to have to cut this guy's foot off if we can't figure out what's wrong with him."

He sighed and held out a hand for the file, then cupped his forehead in a mentalist gesture. "No, wait, I can solve this without the file – his foot's what's wrong with him!"

Wilson left.

Outside new snow began to fall.

****

_Saturday_

These limbs entwined, skin that seemed to melt into his. His heart always this rough animal scrabbling at his ribcage while his cock exploded inside her and she cried out in a deep voice, so manly that he would imagine her in a courtroom badgering a witness. Then the withdrawal, the animal in him stretched out to rest. Dawn sun caught at the curtains. They lay on their sides facing each other and Stacy pressed her head to his chest, dark hair against the sheen of his sweat, and stroked his hip and back and butt with one hand while his own hand found a breast to fondle. He loved his body in such moments, as much as he loved hers, the wholeness of his limbs, muscles thick with exhaustion, the entire system of pleasure conveyed by touch to nerves, all so ingenious he could almost believe in a God who had come up with it, the white-bearded face with an ah-ha smile and a light-bulb over His head.

"I brought a lot of work home for the weekend," Stacy murmured.

"I'm going to the club for breakfast."

After assuring himself there was again nothing on the spy cam (and never would be, something told him), he headed out into the day, through sun that appeared to have forgotten winter, up onto the highway. Checking his rearview mirror was a tic he could not constrain, though he never saw anything. What he had told Wilson – that he could _feel_ himself being followed – was truer than he let on. It was the accumulation, long before the cops or even the bedroom light, of small discrepancies – a figure disappearing around a street corner just as he turned, the hiss of wind down the phone line. Shadows not quite witnessed. At the golf club he parked in the handicap slot because the place was almost empty anyway. The Outward Half Cafe attached to the club smelled of eggs and pancakes. He sat at his favorite table with a dazzling view of the course through the bay windows and ordered coffee and the works.

He needed time to think.

It was a lip-chewing problem. No one had broken into his house, yet someone had broken into his house.

Of course the obvious possibility – the one he had not mentioned to Wilson – was that Stacy was having an affair.

He had always dwelt inside the belief that Stacy Parker loved him – hated him perhaps at times, but was deeply in love with him. His own love affair with sarcasm and insult she seemed able to forgive over and over, something only love could do. (Cue a typical exchange, boyfriend enters right, late from work: "Something smells great." "I didn't cook anything." "That's it."). He never knew why he said such things - she was a good cook, her seared salmon was like a dream – but he had come to realize that she would forgive anything because she was drawn to the bad boy in him. He could insult her senior partner to his face, as he had done at the last Christmas party, something about the man being understaffed in the neurology department after he had made a particularly stupid remark about malpractice suits, and she had been furious, but in bed that night she had ridden him as though she had spurs on, urging on her desire until it burst in a cry so loud he had felt his skull shake. She was, deep down, in love with bad. She talked about curry a lot.

There had been only one incident, an argument a year before, flaring out of nowhere like gasoline on fire, subject now forgotten, in which she had yelled, You're not the only man I can have. The look that had come into her eyes, so rare in her, of having said something she hadn't intended to, had been so frightening it left him dizzy. Until recently he had managed to wall it off, repression his friend.

The waiter brought his food and he sat back until he had finished the black-velvet he had also ordered though it was only mid-morning. Outside, a man and woman were playing golf in spite of the cold, their tiny far-away figures made thick by winter jackets. Sharp sun lit the course in summer glare and he placed a palm against the icy glass to remind himself that it was winter. So Stacy had given a key to her lover, who then went through the house when no one was there, maybe in a deliberate attempt to call attention to himself, force the issue. He shook his head. For some reason he could not believe that she was cheating on him. He would not believe it. To begin to question the assumptions that underlay his happiness was to start an avalanche.

"Dr. Gregory House?"

He was about to say "On his day off, if you wouldn't mind", but when he looked up the woman who had approached his table was big-chested with a wasp-thin waist, which fact could not help but register even before the face (he was after all still a male last time he checked), her face itself a subtle study in Mediterranean, skin hinting at olive. Wavy mocha hair. Forty maybe. Her eyes were large brown pools, stagnant in some way he found disquieting, her only fault. Emotionless. He found himself replying, "I'm your man," and she sat down across from him with a swish of nylon stocking beneath an expensive skirt.

"My name is Anna Sogneau." The card she extended spelled it for him. The medical institute listed was not one he knew, European perhaps. "I hope I'm not keeping you from a game. I have a proposal for you, a medical matter, and this seemed like a good time to speak with you." Her voice, though as velvety-smooth as his drink, had the same dead quality as her eyes, not brisk or ingratiating, at best methodical. She placed a thin briefcase on the table and opened it, the movement languid.

"I don't come here in winter to play golf," he informed her. "Winter rules are a cop-out." Where another woman might have nodded, encouraging him to elaborate, she only gazed. The lack of affect was starting to bother him.

"There's someone out there now," she noted.

"I know." Outside the couple were apparently having a bad golf day, having stopped playing, both gesticulating. Anna Sogneau removed several files and a questionnaire form from her briefcase. They were studying pain, she told him, her clinic's expertise in the area highly regarded. He snuck another peek at the card but the name still rang no bells. Nicely embossed, professional. She hoped, she told him (the _hope_ as flat as the rest of her words) that, being who he was, he would participate in the pilot study.

"We need the weight of a name."

Psychologists know we never look each other straight in the eye in conversation, but rather focus on a point in the middle of the forehead. Direct eye contact is disturbing, animal instinct reading a challenge in it. It took him the length of her speech to figure out that Anna Sogneau always looked him straight in the eye.

"Tell me what your problem with social convention is." For a moment he didn't realize he had spoken. "Then maybe I'll participate in your study."

She seemed not at all startled at the non-sequitur, glancing away out the bay window, and when he turned with her he saw that the golfing couple had given up, walking back to their cart stiffly, as if a wind had arisen. "But I should ask you that," she replied.

He suddenly felt tired. A study, something outside the hospital, might be just what he needed. And if it meant working with her it just might be pleasant. "Fair enough, woman. Come on and show me what you've got." Again, any other woman who exuded sex as she did would have given his small double-entendre at least a smile. She merely slid him a file.

Lists of medications, tramadol, piroxicam, buprenorphine, hydrocodone, oxycodone, naloxone. A dazzling array, too far-reaching. A working theory, not quite fleshed out (a more rigorous study design would be the first change on the agenda if he was going to help), that stated in effect that pain medication efficacy varied according to the personality of the patient. A common-sense assumption, the hardest kind to prove. He would have to beef up on the meds. A few were new and it wasn't his area.

He didn't understand why she wanted to recruit him for a pain management study anyway. His was not that kind of practice. His patients had measles in the brain or gangrenous feet. If they had pain it was short-lived, because they were either cured by him or they died. Management optional.

"We're in the very first stages," she told him. "Recognizing what we need to know. Putting it in terms we can live with." He glanced up at the strange wording. A shadow crossed his brain. She was gazing straight at him again, as though a question had been expressed rather than a statement, then she turned and began putting away files. "I just wanted to approach you today, find out if there was any chance you might be interested. I can leave that file with you." Another glance up, at him and through him. With that enthusiasm she could have faxed her request to him. The shadow in his brain was a stain now, seeping down into his throat like the acrid taste of blood. She leaned forward slightly, with the first intensity she had shown. "I think if you look through that carefully, you'll find a lot of things that interest you." A blink. "This will be an important study, Dr. House. Can I tell the clinic we can count you in, tentatively?" A stirring of thought told him it was all too short, that she should have given him a lot more detail before popping that question, and then he realized he was nodding. Shadows upon shadows.

"Good."

She smiled, small straight white teeth without a blemish, and stashed the last of the files. Her briefcase held a copy of a medical journal called Dementia Today, he noted, which she pushed aside, odd reading as her study had nothing to do with psych disorders. "I'll leave you the forms, Dr. House. You can call me whenever you feel ready."

Whenever he felt ready. Tramadol, naloxone, hydrocodone. "Tell me something –" he asked her. His heart beat to the click of the briefcase clasps as she snapped them shut and stood. "Do you like to wear sneakers?"

For a long, long time the brown eyes were impenetrable. "I personally don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about, Dr. House. But I'm sure somebody somewhere does."

She was at the door before the urge to call her back flooded through him, an urge like the rush of coke to the brain, telling him there was some truth to learn from her, that she was the embodiment of secrets, but when he looked up the swinging door to the cafe foyer had swung shut behind her. The light in his head that had been the urge faded. Anna Sogneau was just a scientist, with a study that was going nowhere. Outside the golfing couple had disappeared. He mulled over the sheet of paper in his hand and saw he would have to phone her back anyway because she had left him the wrong form to fill out; he would be supervising, not taking part.

The weight of his name, she had said. The first line, Patient Name, followed by a long blank, gawked up at him. A section near the bottom asked him to describe his condition.

****

_Tuesday_

"He's a Gregory too," Cameron announced to him uselessly as he stepped into the IC room to examine the patient. She held the chart. The patient whose name was Gregory lay pale and barely breathing after his operation, eyes closed, feigning sleep, he saw immediately, probably because the guy wanted to put off acknowledging for a while longer that he was now an amputee. They had stopped the gangrene progressing up his right foot by cutting the foot off. _All problems should be so simple_. When Cameron handed him the chart her hand brushed his as if by accident. Not in the mood for that either. He knew his only female fellow was in love with him, had been for a long time, just another perk (when it wasn't a bother) in his happy life. Admiration for his brilliance, which had – as far as he could diagnose – gone into a teenie-like crush at some point. He didn't want to break her heart but he would someday, when he got tired of her simpering or the morning traffic had put him in a bad mood. He approached the bed.

Greg Smith looked as bland as his name, curly-haired and clean-shaven. Aside from being his namesake, the patient somehow did remind him of himself in his youth, before frown-lines and three-day beards had had their way with him, some glow of the freewheeling about him, an unhindered optimism, at least until they had revealed to him their plans for his foot. According to the history taken by Cameron, Smith was a hippie and lived on a farm commune. The gangrene had no visible cause, no wound or infection.

"Good news and bad news," he said as he pulled up a stool. The patient's eyes opened. "One, you're alive. Two, the post-op people noticed this." He lifted the patient's left hand to dangle the fingers in front of him. "Look familiar? Last time you saw this it was on your toes. The ones attached to that foot that's now currently in a nice little sealed container awaiting incineration." The dark, almost mummified patches on the tips of two fingers looked like tobacco stains. They might have gone unnoticed if someone hadn't been paying attention. Greg Smith's eyes had widened, darkening at the same time in denial.

"You can't cut my hand off too," he slurred. He tried to sit up, still groggy. "I won't let you –"

"Lie back down. It can probably be saved with vascular surgery. _If_ we can stop the gangrene from progressing. Having it show up in two places like this means it's systemic." _Systemic rot at the core_. For some reason he didn't say it. "Your blood vessels are holding back on you, blood can't get to the extremities and they die off. Also known as vasoconstriction. The question is why."

"Music is my life."

He frowned and Cameron, always the interceding angel, stepped forward. "Greg makes musical instruments," she explained. To the patient she said, "We'll find some way to save your hand."

"You have to," Smith spat out.

Angels bored him. "If not, oh god, we'll be depriving the world of another dulcimer."

"I make guitars," the patient corrected him. "Good ones. At a thousand dollars a pop." The thrust of Smith's chin that spoke anger reminded him of himself again. He never cared about his patients, a fact he had barely enough social conscience to try to hide, and he wouldn't have been caught dead liking one, yet for a second a flash of what he could only imagine was like for Greg Smith shot through him. _Keep that anger going_, he thought. Fight your fate.

The patient's eyes flickered.

He blinked his own eyes to make sure he hadn't imagined it and drew close. "_Look at me_."

Close up he could see it. Greg Smith's pupils danced, as though bubbling beneath the surface, a constant movement that wouldn't focus.

"Focus on something," he commanded. "Her cleavage, for instance." Cameron had already bent over the patient with her penlight. The man's eyes continued to jerk from side to side.

"Nystagmus," she observed in alarm, again uselessly stating the obvious. "Whatever he has, it's causing neurological damage."

"Have you had trouble chewing lately?" The patient only stared at him. "Do you have a pulsating sensation in the temples?" More confusion, this time from Cameron as well. "Lethargy? Come on, answer me. Poor memory?"

Greg Smith's anger flared. "How would I know?"

"The man's got a point," Chase said, entering the room. He came to stand beside Cameron, from which point they stood gazing at their boss, heads both tilted at the same questioning angle, like the odd pretty twins in a horror movie.

"The two of you, get an intestinal biopsy," he ordered. "This is Whipple's."

"It's brain cancer," Chase countered.

"It's Whipple's."

"Stroke, Wernicke-Korsakoff's, a million other things," protested Cameron.

"It's Whipple's."

Evenings were his solace. At home he took down his acoustic guitar from the wall in the back room and plucked at it, something he hadn't done in ages, and Stacy came in with a bottle of beer for each of them and sat on the bar stool, one bare foot wrapped around the pedestal, to listen. He could only think of sad melodies. He told her about the patient. "If he gets well, I'll buy a guitar from him," he declared. "Hell, buy two," she replied, leaning forward with an elbow on one jeans-clothed knee and knocking the beer back. It was part of what he loved about her. She would be a man for a while, companionable, good to kick back and have a beer with, and the next day all woman again, the personification of classy femininity, Guerlain perfumes and Hermes scarves or was it the other way around? Giving him those looks after their sex that stabbed him to the soul with joy. If he could he would bottle those two moments, the companionable and the adulating, alternate between them to the exclusion of all else, but there was always life intruding, all the times when he felt he was connecting with her and not connecting, the point at which they had to get out of the bed or pour the dregs of beer down the sink. Trapping him once again in his fierce loneliness. Around eleven he decided that confronting a music-loving non-conformist patient so much like a self he had never become had made him moronically sappy, and he put the guitar away and went to bed together with her, only to wake at two again, Stacy warm and purr-snoring beside him, while he listened to the creaks from the downstairs floorboard. Straining to make out the linear progression in the sounds that meant they were footsteps crossing a room. The linear progression he had been sure he had identified twenty times in the past month. He could get up and look of course, as he had done twenty times, the last few nights sneaking as silently as a child at Christmas, and he would find nothing. No light on, no broken lock. No smoking gun, the creaks always stopping at some point just before he could round the bottom corner of the staircase. He stayed where he was, while the creaks became tiny distant taps, almost familiar, a branch tapping at a window, and sleep took him. In the morning three empty beer bottles stood on the drainboard and he put them away hurriedly before Stacy could see them, refusing with all the stubbornness in him to think about what they meant.

At the hospital Foreman informed him that his Whipple's diagnosis was wrong and that his 2 a.m. phone call ordering them to check for a brain abscess had been a good hunch.

****

_The Call_

"The call?"

"A good hunch _if_ we'd found a brain abscess. Which we didn't."

"_I didn't call you!_"

The force of his statement made him step back without looking, almost knocking over the whiteboard. Chase caught it and returned to his chair with his coffee, his back very straight, giving his colleagues a _whoa_ look.

"I…talked to you," Foreman said. "You sounded a little drunk, but it was you."

They were staring at him with varying degrees of curiosity. His heart seemed to have left his body, his pulse a karate-chop poking at the back of his neck. A stalker was one thing; expropriating his job was another.

"Sleepwalking," Chase murmured.

He gave him a look he hoped was murderous.

"If so," Foreman yawned, "your sleeping self is the better diagnostician."

"Listen to me." They seemed too unperturbed. "Someone is apparently going around impersonating me."

"Then _he's_ the better diagnostician. Just tell him not to wake me up at two anymore."

"That's impossible," Cameron said. "No one could impersonate you." The implied flattery was sincere and the men gave her disgusted looks.

"_Do not –_" Do not what? Take calls from someone you think is me? He felt dizzy, the beer that should have been long metabolized rising into his throat. Someone was trying to lead his life, someone who could imitate his voice well enough to fool a sleep-addled Foreman. _Get angry_. He thought of his patient, sitting up at the mention of losing his hand though he had no strength to, ready to argue, fight, walk out and die of gangrene if it meant he had control over his body. At least it had appeared that way to him as he looked into Smith's eyes.

"Let's fix _Gregory_," he said, imbuing the name with sarcasm. It seemed the more vital issue. He would deal with his stalker later. There was time, and he hadn't brought out the big guns yet. "I still say it's Whipple's."

"Didn't you hear what we said, Dr. House? The biopsy wasn't PAS-positive –"

"Start him on doxycycline."

"Whipple's doesn't even cause gangrene –"

"Tell him he'll have to take it for a year and send him home."

"But we haven't ruled out brain cancer –"

"Lupus –"

"Sorry, can't hear you all over the sound of how _right_ I am." He looked up at their unbelieving faces. "How right _I_ am. Not some imposter." He felt the weight of his body like a moral standpoint, hands spread on the table while he loomed over them. "_Look at me_." Their gazes were comically in character, Foreman's scornful top-to-toe scrutiny, Chase staring out from beneath one blond strand of hair like a sullen schoolboy, Cameron trusting. "Remember what I look like. This incomparable, _unmistakably_ handsome face will be giving the orders from now on." Only Cameron nodded raptly. "Accept no more instructions over the phone."

Voices that were his whispered to him that he should do more, that this intrusion, his imitator now an audible presence among them, was a step up, something he could work with, go to the cops with. Put into terms he could live with. His cell phone on the table rang. He stared at it like a cave man might gawp at a new kind of animal. They watched him, bemused. At his _Hello_ the voice on the other end diffused through him, warming him, a muscle relaxant. Anna, of the French last name he could not quite recall. It was on the tip of his tongue. Her pain study was waiting, she told him. She had only called to remind him. To ask if he had made a decision.

"I haven't decided yet. I'm busy right now."

"You have my numb-" He hung up.

****

_Thursday_

He slouched in the bedside chair and gazed down at the sleeping patient.

His roommate in college, always profound when he had swallowed a few too many Darvon, once told him, The only thing worth fighting for is happiness, even if it makes you miserable.

He wasn't miserable. He hadn't needed to fight in his life. Father and childhood aside, happiness had fallen into his lap, though he could never recall what he had done to attract it. There was no reason (in his meditative state he touched Greg Smith's bed with the vial that held the patient's spinal fluid, tracing circles), no reason for the restlessness, like ants crawling on him, his own non-drug induced formication, delusional parasitosis, an itch that battered at him, leaving him unsatisfied. It was the hedonic treadmill that therapists spoke of, he supposed: once a dream of happiness has been attained the pleasure center resets itself to boredom, the party of the bored wants the next great thing and gallops after it, getting nowhere. His treadmill was simply set on high. It didn't explain the melancholy laced with panic, a meth rush at the thought that he was overlooking some essential factor in the diagnosis of his life.

He glanced up to find Lisa Cuddy at the door. He didn't know how long she had stood there. Her gaze, which he presumed had lingered on him, shifted to the patient. In amicable troubled silence they watched the man breathe. "Any ideas?" Cuddy asked.

"Yes. I think the hospital should have Chemical Dependency Friday."

"I'm talking about your patient, House."

He walked the vial over his knuckles like a coin in a magic trick. "As of this morning add pleural effusion to his symptoms. Infection maybe. I just did an LP."

"A lumbar puncture's not exactly recommended if he has a brain abscess, is it? Which is what your fellows told me you thought. The pressure gradient could make the brain shift –"

"Thank you, Ms. Dean-of-Medicine-with-little-practical-experience. It wasn't _me _assuming the brain abscess and besides my three blind mice didn't see anything on the scans. But then blind speaks for itself, doesn't it? Rest assured I checked the scans too. No abscess, no brain tumor. There _was_ a brain there." He tossed the vial up and caught it. "It could be paraneoplastic, a cancer somewhere else."

As though triggered by the falling vial Greg Smith's eyes opened. He blinked, and blinked again. "The light's gone out," he mumbled. Slurred speech compressed it into a word: _thlighthonout_. "Nurthe! I feel _thick_-"

The best of both experience and instinct enabled him to dodge most of the patient's outpourings. Cuddy was already at Smith's side, helping to turn him. She thrust a penlight at his eyes. "He's blind! Blind and vomiting!" She spoke as though it was an erudite observation. "He can hardly talk or breathe -" Smith's lips had turned blue and she was punching the call button. "This is neurological damage, House! If your lumbar puncture caused this –"

He could see beyond Cuddy into the hall. At the nurses' station a man stood conversing, only the back of his head and his shoulders half-visible through the crowd. He was tall, with curly brown hair. He wore a biker's jacket.

"House, where are you _going_ –"

He was fast - adrenaline, that oldest of drugs, pumping through him - but when he shoved past a gaggle of visitors to reach the desk, the man had disappeared. The elevator at the end of the hall was just opening. It could not have swallowed him. At the stairwell door a pair of doctors stood chatting away their highly educated time and looked to have been blocking the way for a while.

"Where did that man go?" he asked the nurse behind the counter. She was young and startlingly pretty, new to the floor, he had a vague notion, and he might have flirted with her if he hadn't been busy chasing phantoms. "The one you just spoke to." When she looked at him she had tears in her eyes and then she turned and fled toward the restroom sobbing. An older nurse crossed the station to him. "I don't see why you have to insult people all the time," she said.

"I didn't. I asked a question."

"I'm talking about what you said to her before, Dr. House. Just now."

Absurdly rage rose in him, a teeth-baring rage so unknown to him he had no strategy for dealing with it. He wanted to choke the woman. He could feel the urge pulse through his fingers. He would kill her, kill the other one when she returned from the restroom, dispose of the evidence. He swallowed the anger and it was like swallowing a cold stone.

"Tell her –" _Tell her what?_ "Just tell her not to listen to me next time."

****

_Friday_

It was Scarlett's mantra remade into a curse. Tomorrow _was_ another day, tomorrow was always another day, and that was the horror of it. It was Scarlett grown old and beaten-down, her hope for the future spoken with a bitter aftertaste. Sleep had become a notion he had once had first-hand experience of. No time to think about sneakers that were warm or strangers impersonating him. His patient was dying.

"It's a new symptom, I'll admit."

"If course it's new, House - it's a _brain-stem herniation_."

Outside his office window snow swirled. The patient's brain abscess - the one that had not shown up on the scans because abscesses took four to five days to form a capsule visible under CT (a fact he knew) - had created pressure beneath the skull. Draining the cerebrospinal fluid with a lumbar puncture, as he had done, had caused a tidal wave of release that swept the brain down with it, compressing the stem. The worst kind of concussion. Vision, respiratory function all compromised. A brain tsunami.

He felt as though his own brain had shifted. Mistakes were a part of doctorhood; he had made his share, when he didn't have the right information or a patient had lied, but never because he had failed to think through a chain of events. He pressed his forehead against the glass and the cold from the balcony seeped through his skin. _Compress your thoughts_. It was Smith's gangrene, the rot at the core, that defied him. It was the symptom that fit nothing.

"Go over it all again," he ordered.

A universal sigh rose behind him. Papers rustled. His three fellows slouched or hunkered, Wilson watching from the corner chair. He had not been able to meet their gaze once his mistake had become clear, a reluctance so alien to him it made him cringe.

"You know Cuddy's taken over the case," Chase said. He gave a cautious cough. "She's ordered a decompressive craniectomy. I'm supposed to be prepping him for it now."

"Sure. Take a piece of the guy's skull off and give his gas-rotting brain room to grow. There are better ways to expand a mind. We have to find out what's wrong with him first."

"But she ordered –"

"All right," Foreman acquiesced. He flipped open a file. "Tox screen as we know was clean, no heavy metals."

"A fungus."

"Lupus."

"It has to be paraneoplastic."

They were diagnosing in circles. From where he stood he could see a corner of the parking lot and he watched a figure, tiny in the distance, cross the ice with difficulty.

"Erythremia. Osler-Vaquez."

A patient presumably. The man wore a beret that hid his face. His gait was off, cerebellar, he decided, the stroke victim's gait, making every step a drunken lurch. Diagnosis at a hundred yards and he was proud of himself, but the slippery drunkenness was only the ice, because in the next moment he made out the cane the man clutched in his right hand. Analgic gait, then. A.k.a the wincing limp, adopted by anyone trying to avoid pain. The far-off figure seemed familiar. His heart tightened. He was hot inside the cold, warm suddenly with revelation, his steamy breath fogging the glass. The limping figure passed out of his line of sight. Hallucination was such a wonderful word; it sounded almost like hallelujah. "It was a bug," he declared, triumphant, turning back to the room.

"We ruled out viruses," Cameron noted.

"This was a really big bug. With pretty wings."

They were all staring at him. Slowly Foreman said, "You don't mean…bromo-dragonfly, do you?"

"A hallucinogenic, very powerful. But then you all know that." He ignored Chase, whose mouth had fallen open. "What you may not know is that using bromo-dragonfly even once can cause vasoconstriction and gangrene in the extremities _up to three weeks later_. This Smith guy's a hippie, he lives on a commune. They're happy campers, and in their spare time probably happy little experimenters with the psychedelics." Even Wilson was frowning mightily. It was good to be right again. He felt swollen with right; so swollen he might have been floating above them near the ceiling, condescending to impart this latest stroke of genius which had come unbidden to him as he watched the man in the parking lot, only their expressions were all wrong. Neither approval nor disbelief. More like shock. "A man in Sweden had to have his gangrenous foot amputated. His tox screen showed nothing because he'd tripped on the dragonfly three weeks earlier, it was already out of his system." Numb, uncomprehending shock. Even Wilson looked pale. "Don't you see, this takes gangrene out of the diagnosis. It's unrelated, or only related to our little Gregory playing psychonaut. That leaves the neurological symptoms and the pleural effusion, which can only mean infection. We just have to narrow it down."

Wilson stood, almost knocking over his chair. "Maybe you should let me do this." He was talking to the others.

"What is wrong with you people? Do you need a power-point presentation?"

"Dr. House –" Foreman leaned forward. "You came up with the bromo-dragonfly idea _yesterday_."

Tomorrow was always another day, and when it wasn't it was because something was wrong with his brain. Hallucination was a wonderful word. He was shouting, every name for _stupid_ he could think of, _tool_ and _twit_, he was a walking thesaurus for _dickhead_, a lunging snapping thesaurus held back only by Wilson while the rest of them fled, Cameron crying. Passers-by outside the office stopped to watch the nice-looking doctor talking down the psych patient. He heaved himself against the glass door to the balcony and felt it shudder. The snow had washed the scene white, erasing lines. He could barely make out where the balcony ended and the sky began. Cars in the parking lot were white lumps. No limping figures. A vast quiet descended on him.

"Only Cameron saw me." Through the fear he saw the need to put his spin on it. "Is that right?"

Cameron had been running titers alone in the lab the evening before, she said, when her boss stopped by to tell her the theory that had just occurred to him. She had informed Chase and Foreman, lassoing them into going with her to confront Greg Smith, who had confessed to taking bromo-dragonfly three weeks earlier. They had removed gangrene from the list of symptoms. He could see it from where he stood, a dirty smudge on the whiteboard where the word had been erased.

"Cameron's in love with you." _I swear, I swear_, he could still hear her protesting as Chase dragged her from the room. Wilson's calming voice made him want to yell again because he knew where it was headed. "She's very attuned to you, House, your mannerisms, your face. Even if it was dark in the lab, which it wasn't - she couldn't have been fooled by someone pretending to be you."

She loved the sorrows of his changing face. The line was from a poem, he knew, though he couldn't think which one. Another poem, _This is the hour of lead_. An elaborate practical joke then. Only it would mean his fellows coming up on their own with diagnoses better than his, earlier than he did. And Cameron wouldn't have gone along with it. "Do you know why I came up with the bromo-dragonfly just now?" His voice was lost in the snow beyond the glass. Wilson waited. "I was already thinking of hallucinations."

There are better ways to expand a mind, he had assured them.

He would bring out the big guns.

****

_Another Monday_

Blind rage; intubated rage. Along the corridors of his professional life the whispers passed, like the susurrus of air through the tube now jammed down the patient's throat. Dr. House was crazy. He had endangered his patient's life. He had blank, black blackouts. Talk to his fellows. A nurse in IC can tell you a thing or two.

"I have the answer." His proclamation stopped Wilson at the door and for a moment the distant shouts and rumbling carts of a code blue happening somewhere up the hall floated in. The oncologist closed the door and sat down, eyeing the syringe on the desk.

"I'm all tabula rasa here," he declared. "Hit me with it."

The friendship synapses were already igniting; he could feel them warming him. "It's like this. I couldn't get brain cancer out of my head."

"Makes sense."

"You know what I mean."

It took Wilson two seconds. "We're…not talking about your patient, are we?" He rubbed his face and hair abruptly with the dismay of someone who has just walked through cobwebs and then sighed. "Okay. You've decided there's no real stalker, that there's something wrong with your brain. I can follow that. You've been stalking yourself, so to speak, in blackouts you weren't even aware of. And unless Cameron's lying about seeing you in the lab, you must be right. Now you think the solution to it all is – in there?" The glance at the syringe was dubious. "And the winner is…?"

"Machine elves."

In the quiet that appeared to have descended on the hall outside he watched the face across from him go through stages he could have given names to, Dumb and Dumber, replaced quickly by the Silent Movie Star, mouth open in an O of shock. When Wilson found his voice, it was raspy with disbelief.

"No no _no_. _Please_ tell me you're joking."

"I said I was going to bring out the big guns. This is it. I need to go on a trip."

"You need to be shot through the head. My god, McKenna was nuts even before he deep-fried his brain in drugs. He tripped out, hallucinated bouncing blobs of light that made him feel good about the universe and famously declared them to be some other-dimensional entity only he was able to hook up with. The truth is out there - just turn on, tune in, drop out? You have more sense than that, House." Wilson had leaned forward, a move that could well have presaged him snatching the syringe, and he placed it out of reach. "You think machine elves, in the shape of jeweled balls and which were probably just McKenna's retinas firing off phosphene, are going to bounce in and out of you and tell you what's wrong with you?"

"It's worth a try." The despairing look on Wilson softened him. "Look. I know it sounds like I'm out of my brilliant mind and maybe I am, but I can't think of any other way to…get inside myself. Without the help of someone else. It's hipper than a hypnotherapist. I know me. I won't get lost in there. And maybe I'll come back with a diagnosis for Smith." Anything for the patient. It was an argument his best friend understood. "Chase is performing the craniectomy right now. Against my wishes." He had argued, fervently, to Cuddy that spooning around in Smith's brain would spread whatever infection was killing him. The rot at the core spreading. _Going in for the kill?_ he had asked Chase as he followed him into the prep room to watch him scrub, hoping with one last sarcasm to dissuade him from the operation. "Greg Smith's going to pop his farm-shit covered clogs if I don't come up with something. Everything my –" He forced it past clenched teeth, "– _other_ self has come up with so far has been right." Wilson still looked wild-eyed with disbelief. "To diagnose Smith I need to know what's been happening to me. I need to know the truth."

"Just tell me that's not bromo-dragonfly."

The guy could still make him laugh. "Think I'm crazy? This is DMT. Good old fumarate. I could have smoked it, but with an injection no one's going to ask what that funny smell is."

"I don't understand your reasoning, House. You think you've been hallucinating an imposter, a double you. That you yourself have been sleepwalking through some kind of fugue state while you give diagnoses to your fellows. Won't a hallucinogenic just - make all that worse?"

"I don't see why."

"Tell me about your recreational drug use."

"Why? You've been there for most of it."

"So you say. And not in the last few years. Meaning I can't even make a ballpark guess as to what and how much you're doing now. You're going to add DMT to an unknown mix -"

"Not unknown." He gave an inner sigh. He had expected the protest; he needed Wilson's concern, his devil's-advocate arguing, it was the ulterior motive for calling him to his office. The guy deserved honesty. "A little coke. Once a month or so." Wilson scowled, unconvinced. "I'm nowhere near habituation. Not even in the same zip code as addicted. Maybe in another life I'd be one of those who snort once and get hooked instantly, but in this life apparently I've been blessed – or is it cursed? - with weak opioid receptors. It's not a problem, I have it under control."

"So it's time to move on, test your receptors for psychedelics? Look, you have a career, a girlfriend, a house. Your own department. You have a life."

"Yes, I have all those things, don't I? It's just that –" How could he put into words the dissociation that had come over him, the creaking floorboard in that house of his every night, the bruises on his arms in the morning where he had pinched himself to prove he'd been awake when he heard it? "I can't…quite recall how I acquired all those things. I can never remember why I deserve them."

The tone in his voice made Wilson look straight at him. The very reason he had never woken Stacy all those nights, knowing she would only look at him and not downstairs, that she would never accede to a snag in his personality of that magnitude, was the same reason he wanted Wilson there when he took the hallucinogenic. Men understood when something was tearing at you. Women only expected you to be strong. Wilson's hand brushing again through his hair, clearing the last cobwebs, meant he got it.

"Okay." _How many okays did the guy have in him?_ "I get it." Wilson slumped back in his chair in resignation. "But can't you – at least do this at home? Somewhere where you're safe and comfortable, where you can lie down? What if you go on a bad trip?"

He had rolled up one sleeve high enough to expose the deltoid and a nurse passing in the hall gave him a suspicious look. He gazed around his office. He couldn't imagine anywhere more comforting.

"There was someone like you in ancient history," Wilson told him. "Had to know the truth no matter what it cost him. I believe his name was Oedipus."

"Oh my god, Stacy's my mother?" He flipped the cap from the syringe and pumped it in the air.

"No need to take it that literally. There are lots of truths. And lots of ways they can hurt you. Just how much is that?"

"Seventy-five milligrams."

"That's enough to snow a horse!"

"Now you know Stacy's private nickname for me."

"It's twice the recommended dosage, House."

"There's a recommended dosage for this stuff? Cool."

He placed the needlepoint against his arm. Just before it could break the skin Foreman banged through the door to tell them that Greg Smith had died of cardiac arrest moments earlier on the operating table.

****

_What is comforting about an autopsy room? _He had asked himself the question before, because it had always been as comforting to him as his office, the swish of his Tyvek booties across the clean floor, Smith's body laid out before him like a cold buffet among other icy bodies beneath their sheets, the precision of lifelessness. The knowledge that nothing in the room would move from where it had been placed, that it would not talk back, but only reveal the answers that lay in waiting for him. Greg Smith looked peaceful, the dead muscles in his cheeks and jaws beginning to droop with gravity, leaving the bones more prominent, lending his face a sculpted asceticism. He laid out his tools. At the other end of the room a technician cleaned a table with intermittent sprays from a hose. First the eyes. Rigor mortis had set in and he had a hard time opening the left lid. He held it open with one hand, Smith's pupil a blue pool, fully dilated as was always the case in a corpse as the iris relaxed, and with his other hand he swung the overhead lamp in place to check for petechiae.

In the bright light he saw Greg Smith's pupil constrict to a pinpoint.

The shock made him rear back, knocking his head on the lamp, and it skittered, throwing shadows. "This man is alive!" he cried. The technician turned to stare. "We need a crash cart!" His own heart was pumping so fast it seemed a thing outside of him, pressing in on his chest rather than outward, and as the technician shook his head and said, "We don't – have one here," he lunged to the hall door and shouted, "Crash cart, dammit! Anyone!" The basement hall was deserted. He spun back on the technician. "Surely you have an AED on the floor!"

The technician's scrubs had been green before. They were blue now. "Dr. House –"

It was paralysis that made him slow and stop, then turn back to the table. Smith's body was gone. The table in the middle of the room was bare and shiny. No sheet, no tray of tools.

His voice was low and even as he said, "What did you do with the body?" He could control his voice with his breathing, he realized, control his face, the terror only a grimace in his intestines, though the finger he pointed at the table shook. As if pointing were not a universal sign the technician's stare wandered the room, to the other bodies lumped under sheets.

"Which one?" he asked.

"You took it."

The technician looked scared for his job for a second, then resolution set in. House was that wacko one, his look said, he had nothing to worry about. "I don't know what you're talking about, Dr. House."

"The body I was working on, dammit. Greg Smith."

"We don't have a Smith down here right now. And you weren't working. You just walked in."

_Find Wilson_. The impulse fed his paralyzed nerves. Wilson would know what to do. When he swung back out the door the basement hall was full of people. The walls had been painted bright colors. A large space in the middle held a nurses' station. Visitors' alcoves, tactfully located in corners, sported comfortable two-seaters and potted palms. The fourth-floor chatter had always bothered him, its low hum made up of restrained nurses' voices and the quiet desperate conversations of visitors, and when he saw Foreman about to enter a room at the end of the hall he walked to him to get away from it.

"A strange thing happened on the way to my autopsy," he told his fellow. "I lost Smith."

"They moved him in here." Foreman led the way into the room. "What autopsy?"

Propped against pillows in the bed Greg Smith was wolfing down a steaming lunch while Cuddy checked his blood pressure. The patient's eyes rested on her cleavage with lively interest for a moment before turning to the two doctors at the door. The sheet had slipped off his right ankle, revealing the bandage from the amputation. A three-day growth of beard had heightened his similarity to his doctor.

"I haven't had a chance to thank you, Dr. House," Smith said. "Lumpy-jaw, jeez."

He felt dizzy for no reason. The room was suffocating. There was something he had forgotten, some cause for the adrenaline still whirring in his system, and then he remembered. He had been in the autopsy room. He took a step toward the bed, one hand behind him to lean for support on the small side table. On the table lay a copy of a magazine called Dementia Today. "I didn't do anything," he rasped.

Cuddy looked up. "A _humble_ House? This is something new."

He was trying to shake his head. _Find Wilson_. It seemed a new thought. "I mean, I didn't _do_ anything. I didn't cure you. You -" _You died_. He stopped himself in time. His mouth was dry. His tongue scraped the roof of it like an old bone.

"Well, of course it will take a few months on antibiotics before he's well," Foreman put in. His gaze on his boss was confused. "But you're the one who came up with the farm commune equals cows idea. Not to mention the gangrene from the bromo-dragonfly being a completely unrelated matter."

"Brilliant." Cuddy had turned away, her mumble almost lost, but the admiration still resonated.

Smith shrugged, smiling. "You may not think it was much, Dr. House, but it was. You're getting a custom-built guitar out of this. Maybe two."

His head was going to explode; it was nausea, a seasickness in the brain. He launched himself from the table's edge to the bed. "_Tell me the diagnosis_." Cuddy and Foreman stared. "How did it work out?"

Smith seemed to think it was a ritual, the patient, once cured, required to recite his ills in a rosary of gratitude. "I – uh – don't know if I'm saying it right – actinomycosis? Also known as lumpy-jaw? Which the dairy cows I take care of have had now and then, I just didn't know _humans_ could catch it from them. And in my intestine instead of my jaw where the lumps might have been seen."

"Breaking away to your brain and lungs and heart." He finished for him. Smith nodded. Connections burst in his mind. The pressure in his head was like a boulder expanding from the inside. The earth was sliding beneath him. "I wasn't here," he muttered, fighting to remember what he had been doing. He looked around. It was important. "I was…somewhere else."

"Of course you were here," Cuddy assured him. "You came in this morning and gave me the diagnosis personally. Good that it was before the craniectomy. With his heart infected, an operation might have killed him."

"Who do you think I am?" At the oddness of the question they all stopped moving, a quiet tableau of consternation. The sounds rising from the hall outside ground to a halt, the entire hospital packed in cotton, waiting for the answer. "_Who am I?_"

"You're…you, House." Cuddy murmured. And then as an afterthought, glancing at his legs as if it meant something: "You're walking well."

This was abulia, the loss of will in the brain-damaged. He couldn't move, couldn't make himself want to, then he had turned and plunged toward the door. All the lights went out in the same instant. In the utter dark his cheek was pressed against a wall; he was in a small space, a crawl space, left hand free to grope sideways, feeling for an exit while his body inched after it. The blackness was complete. If he pressed his face hard enough against the wall he might push through. A voice from somewhere was calling him.

"House! Snap out of it, dammit – trip's over!"

His eyes flew open. He sat at his desk in his office, head down, cheek crushed against the blotter, as though he had decided to take a nap. His palms still fought to break through the wall that was merely the desk, pushing against the surface on either side of his face. He struggled to sit up and saw the empty syringe on the desk beside him.

"Get hold of yourself before someone comes in." Wilson had moved halfway around the desk and bent over him, shielding the sight of him from anyone passing in the hall, and was fumbling the rolled-up sleeve down in a wifely attempt to hide the injection site. Abruptly he could feel the sting of the shot, still lingering.

"I took it." His mouth was dry in a familiar way.

"Of course you took it. You've been in gaga-land the last ten minutes."

"Foreman didn't come banging in and -?"

Foreman came banging in. Wilson furtively flicked the syringe onto the floor behind the desk. Foreman didn't seem to notice. His face was drawn as he told them Greg Smith had just died of cardiac arrest on the operating table.

****

_Then_

_How much of you is real?_ His own heart was still pounding, a fist beating at his breastbone to get out. The wall had never gone away; it was there, beyond his vision. It was the substance he pushed against. Wilson and Foreman had turned to watch him, his reaction to Smith's death a precipitant for their own, Wilson's set jaw masking his concern. "Means I don't get a guitar," he responded to the news and shrugged. The nonchalance satisfied Foreman, who turned to go. "Autopsy him," he added, ignoring the keen glance from Wilson. "Look for actinomycosis in the intestine."

He waited until the startled Foreman had left the room before he began searching.

"What did you see, House?"

"It has to be here somewhere."

"House – what did you _see_?" Wilson retrieved the syringe from the floor and with scary Wilson efficiency wrapped it in a tissue and slipped it into his jacket for later disposal. "What did the drug show you?"

He had hauled his coat from the stand by the door, tangling it and almost knocking over the stand, and then thrown the coat over the desk to go through the pockets. The contents of his wallet scattered across the chair as he fumbled it open. Coins rolled to the floor. "I saw a magazine."

Wilson slid a penlight from his breast pocket and approached him to shine it in his eyes. "You're not all the way down yet."

In his panicked state it sounded like a prophecy. _Haven't hit bottom_. He shoved the hand with its penlight away. "Which makes you real or not real?"

"_What?_"

From the backmost section of his wallet the card he sought fell out. The generic name of Anna Sogneau's institute leered up at him, as formless as wax. No address, an oddity he had failed to notice before, only a number, an area code he didn't know. He grabbed the phone and punched it in. "Naloxone is an opioid antagonist, isn't it?" he asked Wilson. He hated the look on his friend's face; it mirrored too well the sick confusion he felt in himself. Dementia today. On the other end the line began to ring. "_Isn't it?_ It would be used to _counteract_ abuse of something like hydrocodone, vacuum it back out of an addict's system. What would it be doing on a list of pain meds?"

"Uh – taking up room where it doesn't belong? House - what are you doing? You need to come down -" Wilson's hand gripped his on the phone.

"Leave me alone." He shook the hand off. "There's this woman. She knows about things. I think she can help me. I've got to see her, and it's got to be now."

It took a second of silence to make him look up, another second to grasp the disgust on Wilson's face. "Does Stacy know you do these things?"

"Come on dammit, I'm not calling a hooker." The line was still ringing. "I've been off that train for two years."

"Only two years? You've been with Stacy for five."

"It took a while. Hello?" Someone had picked up. He had expected a tape for some reason, the click and rush of breath giving no sign of whether the person on the other end was alive or electronic. Then it giggled. It laughed. A cackle that morphed into a belly laugh, great heaving sob-like gasps, that worked back down to a giggle and then started all over again, the choking laugh of a man too tickled to catch his breath. He knew the tape. Years ago he had asked an acquaintance who worked in TV to compose a male laugh track for him and he had used it on his answering machine until he had moved and gotten a new number. Most callers had hated it. Wilson was staring at him. On the phone the tape had ended, waiting for his message, and he could hear wind down the line, a faraway impression of presence. _Talk to yourself_.

He hung up. "Wrong number." Wilson had swerved the card toward himself to read it and he yanked it back and punched the number in again, not using redial. His fingers shook. A click and a rush of breath; a woman's voice this time, saying, "May I help you?" It did not mention the institute. A bright inquisitive voice, not the lethargic one he remembered from the cafe. _Please make it the right number._

"I'm - looking for…Anna Sogneau." It was difficult to say the name, there was something unpalatable about it, sweet and bitter, two tastes that would not combine. His tongue shied from it.

"You won't find her here, I'm afraid, Dr. House."

"Are you sure? This is very important." _How do you know me?_

"Have you tried the cafe?"

He hung up again. Wilson stared, utterly lost. Illogic was a sign of something, and he tried to recall what. It was a hand on his throat and for a moment he couldn't breath. _Come down_. He scrutinized Wilson. Details. The hair combed just so, his pocket protector. All the small things that added up to familiarity. They never changed; in good times or bad they were the details that were immutable. Everyone needed a focal point, he realized, the one thing that would not change when the world spun around them. Inside him the sadness opened up. "Will you be there?" he murmured to Wilson and then started, shocked because the question made no sense. Wilson's brows shot up, his eyes feverish with worry. "I have to go to the golf club."

"You can't go anywhere like this, House!"

He had grabbed his coat and the essentials from his wallet before the hand on his arm stopped him. "Don't!" Wilson ordered. "You can't drive right now!" They were tussling before he knew it. Barreling around his desk he tossed his friend's hold off with ease and Wilson was slammed against the lightbox on the opposite wall. This was his strength; he couldn't remember where that came from either, his perfect health suddenly an odd notion, incongruent to him. It was all too easy. "Someone's lying to me!" he shouted at Wilson, who rubbed the back of his head and looked ready for another attempt, pausing in confusion at his words. _I hate being lied to_. "I have to find out the truth!"

"Don't go –"

The highway forked at Mercer and he almost missed the turnoff, yanking the wheel right while his thoughts skidded. Drivers honked. Bifurcation, the scientists called it, every moment an infinite array of forking paths, we choose one job over the other, marry this one instead of that one and our life follows a new path, branching off from what it might have been. A mind, if it was strong enough, he supposed, could cut across branches, leave messages. In the form of a beautiful woman. Show you a patient alive and well you had assumed dead. _Mystic crap_, another part of him groaned. In a world of infinite _you_s, who would be the real one? An Escher drawing, Wilson had said. "Who's dreaming who?" he whispered now aloud to his wide eyes in the car mirror. The golf club loomed, the parking lot deserted again, and he pulled into the handicap slot cop-style, half over the line, and leapt out.

He saw the dark hair at the bay-window table, the only person in the room, and she looked up sedately when he approached. "Hi, Stacy," he murmured. He sat. She didn't act surprised to see him. He was beyond shock himself. If nothing made sense, then Stacy could be here, in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. She could be expecting him. The sight of her calmed him, as with Wilson, all the familiar details, her mother's cross, the nails kept short so she wouldn't bite them. Things would be all right, he told himself, and knew they wouldn't. "I'm glad you're here," he said to her. "Strange things have been happening to me."

"We need to talk."

He nodded.

As she spoke, lifting her glass of water to sip now and then, he sensed alterations in the sunlit window behind him, scudding clouds, a storm rising. He didn't look away from her. Their relationship was not all it should have been. He had changed at some point, lost some spark he had once had. He had once been the non-conformist and she had fallen in love with that, his off-the-wall ideas about life and society propelling them, making her feel a part of something larger, something that had a purpose other than his own cynicism. Now, lately, he was like some big contented cat.

"Maybe it was being given your own department, Greg. Having these fellows who are always telling you how brilliant you are. You've lost some impetus, a reason to do better, to try harder at anything."

"Everything is too easy." His mumble could barely be heard.

"I think you need hardship, problems that keep you on your toes, and you just don't have any."

"Just what hardship would you propose? Maybe I could amputate my right hand and see if I can still be a brilliant doctor without it." The changing light hurt his head, dimming now as though black clouds had moved in, not above but from the sides.

She was shaking her head. "I don't think that's what it is." At her words the gulf opened up inside. He was falling. "Do you know what graceful degradation is, Greg?"

"I've heard the term."

"It's the way a web site is made less in order to fit on a cell phone or an older browser. The programming is altered. Some of the features can't be accessed. It still looks like the original, but it won't perform as quickly or as well, because parts of it aren't there." Her eyes met his. "Parts of you aren't there, Greg."

Outside the edges of the golf course had become murky, blurred at the periphery. Gracefully degraded. Not forked lives then, both equal, but rather one the original and one…less. A life in which everything went his way, in which he was revered, permanently happy, except that his patients died. It was no wonder he could never remember his past, how he had come to be where he was. A life murky at the edges. Who's dreaming who? he had wondered, but he knew. A strong mind, weak at the same time, turning from some calamity he could only imagine to flee into an illusion of happiness. He should have seen it himself, but then he wasn't performing well.

The pressure behind his eyes was tears, a crushing weight, a wall he could push through if he tried hard enough. "I have to take part in the pain study, don't I?" he murmured to Stacy. The face came to him. Anna Sogneau, who had sat in the seat there across from him, the name clear now. "Because it will make me a better doctor?"

"I don't know."

"I'm scared."

"You're strong, Greg."

He wanted to ask her if she would be there, as he had asked Wilson, but somehow he knew she wouldn't be.

The cafe had darkened to a night dimness, the sole source of light a blue glow from beneath the bar in the far corner. When he turned he saw a figure in the shadows, tall and furtive, across the room. It turned and disappeared through a small door he had never noticed in the wall next to the lobby door.

****

_Now_

"Stop!"

He was at the small door in seconds. Behind it lay a service stairwell, shabby concrete steps leading up. The figure was a rustle of movement above him, unseen, and he charged after it.

"Stop!"

At every bend the figure was just ahead, sweeping out of sight around the next curve. He lost count of stairs. The cafe from the outside could never have had so many floors. The last flight ended in a steel door, somehow familiar, closing swiftly on hydraulic hinges, only a crack left, and he threw himself against it and out into night air.

He stood on the hospital roof, gasping. In the distance lay the Princeton campus, the buildings he knew from a thousand moments of solitude he had sought there above his hospital office, their lights afloat in the dark. It was summer. Heat hit him like a wall. The figure ahead of him had stopped and turned.

"You –"

He should have said _me_. The sad thing he could never recall, all the moments of panicked melancholy, rested there in that face, in the lines that were deeper than his own. In the cane lay a story he didn't want to know. The air about the figure shimmered, a subtle glow, the corona around the moon in fog or when seen through tears.

He had never come to a complete halt when he burst through the door and the momentum of rage drove him forward. They met like linebackers, strength matched, wrestling or hugging. Faces close, their breath mingled, the other's hot boozy breath on his cheek. _Give it to me_. No more lies. My life, my talent. The lives of my patients. _I won't let you go until you do_. So close, limbs tangled, they were melting into one another. "Wake up," he felt a voice whisper in his ear.

The other reached down to touch his right thigh and pain and light flooded through him.

E n d


End file.
